More Science from an Easy ChairLankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
History
More Science from an Easy Chair
Lankester, E. Ray (Edwin Ray), Sir
Natural history; Science
changes of eye-to-frame distance are made is shown by the following
simple facts. According to the simple laws of perspective, if the eye
is at thirty inches from the picture-plane or frame (as declared by a
moon drawn of a little more than a quarter of an inch broad), a post
or a man six feet high drawn on the canvas as three inches high
absolutely and definitely means that that man or post is sixty feet
away from the observer inside the picture. The height of the
represented object is the same fraction of the real object as the
eye-to-frame distance is of the distance of the observer to the real
object. If by a two-inch moon the artist has thrown you back from the
front plane of the scene to a distance of nineteen feet, then the
six-foot post or man drawn as three inches high definitely asserts
that it or he is 456 feet distant within the picture. So, too, if the
church tower which cuts the moon is really sixty feet high and is
drawn of two inches vertical measure in the picture, it is an
assertion--when the moon is represented one quarter of an inch
broad--that the church tower is 290 yards, or a sixth of a mile
distant. If, on the other hand, other things remaining the same, the
moon is drawn two inches in diameter, the church tower is now asserted
to be eight times as far off, or about a mile and a third. Very
generally these facts are not considered by painters. They represent
the low moon (or sun) big because the erroneous mental impression is
common to all of us that it _is_ big--that is, bigger, much bigger,
than the high moon or sun, and they do not follow out the consequences
in perspective of the pictorial increase of the moon's apparent
diameter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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